We are trying to make a large community of "Gilets Jaunes" ("Yellow Vest" social movement, France) migrate from a massive use of Facebook to Free as in Freedom, secure & privacy friendly software.

One of the main weakness's of this movement is that it relies on Facebook & other proprietary softwares that allow easy police surveillance, and this is undermining the movement's capabilities in various ways.The strategy is to setup different levels of filtering information, but mostly sharing information on secured channels.One has to understand that the communities act like small organisations, and could federate with other communities, that many user's are not very comfortable with software, mostly use a mobile, and will certainly continue using FB.

The number of users could vary and peak from at least a 100 to more.The ideal solution would be self-hosting, not possible for the moment, but will is considered if the migration is a success.

Seems like there is quite few people around asking about similar things in regards to the movement in France. Maybe its good to talk and see what is it that you want in terms of features, what is the scope in terms of amount of people and then see what are the possibilities and how to facilitate.

We would love to help you out, but this definitely needs more coordination. We will have a small internal discussion and will reach out to you (and others who asked via other channels) to organize a meeting/brainstorming session.

I'm glad others have got in contact with you.We can certainly learn from Disroot's experience.Mainly people will be having discussions, sharing documents and occasionally video call & sharing.

At the moment it is hard to predict how many will migrate, the idea is to migrate our "organisation" side, spread the word and hopefully get other groups in France to join the Matrix ecosystem and this is quite a challenge, seeing the variety of groups & softwares peolpe are using.

Looking forward to having a meeting with you, so as to give you a bigger picture.

minds is not open source meaning it fall short under the same issues as facebook does.

Do not run away from one walled garden silo into another one.Have a look at hubzilla or friendica as a example for proper federated and open source alternatives to facebook.

As for Riot, I dont think the state in which the platform is right now can handle a load generated by such huge movement like this. There is ennormous issues with resrouces needed to run a matrix server as well as lag, delay and federation issues. Those maybe be fixed in the future but at this moment it would just work against you since your users will get pushed away by it.

Have a look at deltachat for instance. Its based on email which means everyone has an account even when they dont use deltachat. It uses end to end encryption and there are apps for mobile as well as desktop out there. https://delta.chat/en/

Currently together with some disrooters we are working on improvements to Hubzilla and XMPP chat protocol which we believe is the way to go and will be promoting on disroot once all the work we plan are finished. We hope in next few months we will have the most amazing social network and cool webchat all up and kicking.

This is not that easy. Not only it requires additional tools and management it also not that cheap. We are working internally on a way to facilitate this kind of things as well. Probably you will hear more about it soon.

In fact my first idea was an IRC channel on Freenode as "general talk" no "sensitive" information but making people that are to used to sharing images & videos content on FB use IRC, i doubt would work though may be the "lightest" as far as server load.

At disroot we also run xmpp server (if you have a disroot account you can just login using any xmpp client). If you are searching for xmpp provider to host the server with your own domain etc. we could easily host that for you for reasonable price (send me private msg if you are interested).

Nonetheless Minds.com is open-source (see: https://gitlab.com/minds) but also working on the decentralize dat:// protocol and integrates the Ethereum blockchain for interested users (with MetaMask in option).

Plus the founder is spending much of his time to answer user questions, he is reachable.

@rom Ahhh... coool. Sorry I havent look beyond the front page that did not have any information about the source code (maybe even missed it there) I sort of assumed it's not. Thanks for clearing that up.

@rom is minds then federated? I didnt see any info about that apart form the fact you can host it yourself (but if you cant federate then there is not much point eg. signal). I see a lot of crypt/ads/subscription stuff on minds.

The priority for users is privacy, encryption, group creation at 2 levels (public + private) and exchange of documents, pictures, videos & calls.Ease of use and installation process.

Diaspora lacks certain of these features, Minds is not yet (?) federated and no application is available on F-Droid ( if one wants to avoid Google Api ) : https://f-droid.org/fr/Where as Riot, Nomad, Fedilab applications are available on F-Droid.We forgot to mention movim : https://movim.eu/App available on F-Droid too.

Friendica, Movim looks more user friendly than Hubzilla and this is very important, personnaly i used Diapora a while back so will try all 3.

@muppethFrom a hosting perspective, as you recommend XMPP should be considered.

Delta Chat : https://delta.chat/en/ has not yet a Windows Client, but is definatly interesting because it's a simple way to have encrypted chats with email protocol.